Tesla shares that saw a 13.5 per cent rise to $1,199.78 on Monday. Musk owns around 18 per cent of all Tesla shares and had previously walked the talk on his claims of reducing his stake by around 10 per cent….reports Asian Lite News
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk fortune jumped by $33.8 billion to $304.2 billion, creating one of the biggest one-day jumps in wealth.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Musk’s Musk once again surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who now stands second on the list with a $196 billion fortune.
Tesla shares that saw a 13.5 per cent rise to $1,199.78 on Monday. Musk owns around 18 per cent of all Tesla shares and had previously walked the talk on his claims of reducing his stake by around 10 per cent.
Last year similarly, Musk had earned a profit of an estimated $25 billion in one single day. As Tesla’s share rose by 20 per cent Musk’s fortune multiplied to $174 billion. Musk added $121 billion to his net worth in 2021.
Meanwhile, Tesla delivered a record 936,172 vehicles in 2021, an 87 per cent increase over the 499,550 vehicle deliveries Tesla made in 2020.
In the fourth quarter (Q4), the Elon Musk-run electric car-maker achieved production of more than 305,000 vehicles and deliveries of over 308,000 vehicles — up from 241,300 deliveries in the third quarter (Q3).
“In 2021, we delivered over 936,000 vehicles. Thank you to all of our customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders and supporters who helped us achieve a great year,” Tesla said in a statement recently.
Of the deliveries, 11,750 were for the Model S and X, while 296,850 were for the Model 3 and Y.
Both the Model 3 and Y also made up the most of deliveries at 936,172 shipments, compared to the 24,964 Model S and X deliveries.
Musk was yet to reply to either Jayapal or Cruz, who is a staunch critic of the Tesla CEO for not paying enough taxes, on Twitter….reports Asian Lite News
After Pramila Jayapal, the first Indian-American woman to serve in the US House of Representatives, took on Elon Musk for not paying enough taxes and bragging about it, Republican Senator Ted Cruz has also criticised the Tesla CEO for “looting” the country.
In a tweet, Jayapal said: “Elon Musk made $36 billion in one day, but wants to brag about paying an $11 billion tax bill. Oh yeah, he also added more than $270 billion in wealth just since the pandemic started.
“Time for the rich to pay their fair share.”
Reacting to her tweet, Cruz said late on Wednesday: “Got it. You don’t like @elonmusk, Who else do you want to loot?”
Musk was yet to reply to either Jayapal or Cruz, who is a staunch critic of the Tesla CEO for not paying enough taxes, on Twitter.
The world’s richest person has a net worth of nearly $280 billion.
“With a top tax rate of 40.8 per cent, he faces a federal tax bill of about $10.7 billion,” according to reports.
Musk has also said on Twitter that he’ll pay more than $11 billion in taxes this year.
“For those wondering, I will pay over $11 billion in taxes this year,” he tweeted last week.
The disclosure came as Musk and other billionaires in the US are facing increasing scrutiny over the amount of tax they pay.
In early November, Musk started selling off billions worth of Tesla shares, which involves paying a combined tax rate of over 53 per cent, according to CNBC.
Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that Musk paid zero federal income tax in 2018, and only paid $455 million in taxes in the previous four years despite his wealth growing by $13.9 billion.
Waves of excitement swept Mumbai, particularly IIT-B, soon after Twitter Inc. announced Dr Parag Agrawal as its new CEO, a hardcore ‘Amchi Mumbaikar’ replacing Jack Dorsey, reports Quaid Najmi
Waves of excitement swept Mumbai, particularly IIT-B, soon after giant microblogging service provider, Twitter Inc. announced Dr Parag Agrawal as its new CEO, a hardcore ‘Amchi Mumbaikar’ replacing the founder-CEO Jack Dorsey.
The proclamation was greeted with pride at his alma mater, the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), at Powai, where he studied between 2001-2005 and graduated in B. Tech from the department of Computer Science & Engineering.
IIT-B Director Prof. Subhasis Chaudhari said that the significance of any university is often judged by the collective achievements of its alumni and the glory they bring to their alma mater, and Agrawal “is one such alumnus that IIT is proud of”.
“The education and ambience that IIT-B provided to Agrawal, not too long ago, helped in bringing out the best in him. Building on top of it with hard work and dedication, he has reached the top. Our congratulations to him and we hope that IITB can continue to produce such achievers,” Prof Chaudhari said in a warm tribute.
A beaming Prof Supratim Biswas, his teacher at IIT-B’s Computer Science & Engineering Department, who taught him a couple of subjects, recalls Agrawal being the topper of the course in 2005 and bagging a coveted Silver Medal.
“He was extremely well-organised, very bright, well-behaved and focussed in life. He was the typical topper-type material and had all the qualities of an achiever,” he recalled.
He pointed out how IIT-B gets toppers from all over India and to excel them requires “special calibre”, which Agrawal displayed. “No wonder he has got this huge honour at such a young age.”
Born in Mumbai to a Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) officer and a schoolteacher, Agrawal studied at the Atomic Energy Central School No. 4, at Anushakti Nagar in north-east Mumbai, where his schoolmate was famed playback singer Shreya Ghoshal.
After cracking the IIT-JEE in 2000, he graduated from the IIT-B, and later proceeded to the US where he obtained his doctorate in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2011.
In between, in 2001, he bagged the gold medal at the International Physics Olympiad in Turkey, one of the many feathers in his cap.
After collaborative stints with Microsoft Research, Yahoo! Research, AT & T Labs for research in large-scale data management, in Oct. 2011 Agrawal joined Twitter Inc. as a distinguished software engineer and exactly six years later was appointed as the Chief Technology Officer in October 2017.
At Twitter Inc., Agrawal is responsible for its technical strategy, overseeing machine learning and AI across the consumer, revenue and science teams in the company.
Since 2011, he has led efforts on scaling Twitter Ads systems, and re-accelerating user growth by improving home timeline relevance.
Significantly, just 24 months ago in December 2019, ex-CEO Dorsey had deployed Agrawal as in-charge of Project Bluesky – “an independent team of open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media that would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform.”
November 29 marked a milestone for Agrawal as Dorsey announced his quitting from Twitter and passed him the powerful ‘handle’.
On his special memories associated with IITB, Agrawal says: “Working with friends to build shared storage and streaming services over the Hostel intranet and spending time near Vihar Lake behind Hostel 4 with close friends”.
And his unique Mantra for Success: “The whole can be much greater than the sum of parts.”
Agrawal is married to Vineeta, a general partner with a California-based VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and they have a son.
Musk praises Agrawal
Soon after Parag Agrawal, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, became Chief Technology Officer (CEO) of Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk took to the micro blogging site to praise Indian talent in the US.
Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. 🇮🇳🇺🇸 (Congrats, @paraga!)
“Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Palo Alto Networks and now Twitter run by CEOs who grew up in India. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants. (Congrats, Parag Agrawal),” Collison wrote. Musk then tweeted, “USA benefits greatly from Indian talent!”
Netizens slam new Parag
Parag Agrawal, the new Indian-origin CEO of Twitter replacing Jack Dorsey, was trolled on Tuesday on his own platform for an 11-year-old tweet that carried racist remarks.
In 2010, when he was not even an employee of Twitter, Agrawal quoted a comedian mocking racism and Islamophobia in America.
“If they are not gonna make a distinction between Muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists,” Agrawal said in the tweet posted on October 26, 2010.
Questioning this, Republican Ken Buck, who represents Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District, asked how users could trust Twitter’s new CEO to treat everyone equally.
Question: Why is this sentence (from the new @twitter CEO) in quotes?
Answer: Because he is quoting a comedian that had just aired on the Daily Show.
However, Agrawal was quick to clarify his comments to a user. “I was quoting Asif Mandvi from The Daily Show. The article you are reading seems too deep for my current mental state,” he posted.
Agrawal also posted about Facebook and noted that the social media giant is simply a waste of time. “Facebook is like a jail. You sit around, waste time, have a profile picture, write on walls and get poked by guys you don’t know (via gizmodo),” he wrote.
Agrawal had earlier tweeted: “Facebook is seriously messed up. The https settings revert back to http when you use any app that doesn’t do https.”
Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday tweeted: “Wishing you the very best ahead @jack, and congrats @paraga and @btaylor – excited for Twitter’s future!”
“Wishing you the very best ahead @jack, and congrats @paraga and @btaylor – excited for Twitter’s future,” Pichai said in a tweet.
Agrawal will take over from Dorsey as the CEO in 2022. Agrawal joins a select group of CEOs of Indian origin heading technology companies in the US.
Tesla has generally ramped up deliveries of cars to customers at the end of each quarter….reports Asian Lite News
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has urged employees not to be in a hurry to deliver vehicles in the ongoing festive quarter but focus on minimising costs, because he doesn’t want the company “spending heavily on expedite fees, overtime and temporary contractors just so that cars arrive in Q4.”
Tesla has generally ramped up deliveries of cars to customers at the end of each quarter.
In a memo to employees seen by CNBC, the Tesla CEO said that what has happened historically is that “we sprint like crazy at end of quarter to maximize deliveries, but then deliveries drop massively in the first few weeks of the next quarter”.
“In effect, looked at over a six-month period, we won’t have delivered any extra cars but we will have spent a lot of money and burned ourselves out to accelerate deliveries in the last two weeks of each quarter,” he wrote.
Tesla Model Y. (Photo: Twitter/@Tesla)
The memo was sent after Tesla was able to increase its global deliveries to over 241,000 in its latest quarter, despite supply chain issues and chip shortage.
According to the report, Tesla hasn’t released a clear delivery target for 2021, but that it aims to increase deliveries by around 50 per cent on an annual basis.
Tesla has reiterated its guidance for “50% average annual growth in vehicle deliveries” over a multi-year horizon, including on its third-quarter earnings call.
The electric car-maker delivered 500,000 vehicles in 2020, and has already reported delivering 627,350 in the first three quarters of 2021.
The world’s richest man had earlier posted two of the costliest tweets in the history of Global Inc….reports Asian Lite News
Elon Musk has offloaded Tesla shares worth $5 billion, after he was trolled on Twitter for a controversial poll last weekend where he proposed selling 10 per cent of his stock in the electric car-maker.
Initial filings in the US showed that Musk had sold 934,091 shares for about $1.1 billion, out of more than 2.1 million options he received as part of a compensation package.
The filings that were posted later on Wednesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed that Musk sold another 3.58 million shares in Tesla. That sale was valued at about $4 billion, reports TechCrunch.
The world’s richest man had earlier posted two of the costliest tweets in the history of Global Inc.
In a tweet announcing the poll over the weekend, Musk said: “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10 per cent of my Tesla stock.
“I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”
Nearly 58 per cent of Elon Musk’s followers who participated in his Twitter poll told him to sell 10 per cent of his stock (worth $24 billion) in the electric car company, ostensibly to pay more tax.
Musk posted: “Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock.”
The bloodbath that followed sunk Tesla stock by $200 billion (market capitalisation was $1,211 billion on November 5 end of day and $1,023 bn on Tuesday).
Musk’s own net worth took a $50 billion beating.
He has been a vocal critic of a proposal to tax unrealised gains on publicly traded assets in the US.
According to a recent report, despite many challenges, Tesla has produced and delivered over 200,000 vehicles in Q2 2021…reports Asian Lite News.
Elon Musk-owned Tesla has delivered a lot of vehicles in the UK in June and that resulted in record electric vehicle sales in the market with an 11 per cent market share of the overall auto market.
The UK has become a very important market for Tesla. In Q1 2021, Tesla delivered 7,304 electric cars in the UK — more than any other European market.
Last quarter, the automaker topped that off with 7,767 vehicles delivered in the country based on registration data.
But due to Tesla’s distribution model, most of those vehicles were delivered in June.
It resulted in an interesting automotive market in the UK in June with 11 per cent of all sales being all-electric.
According to a recent report, despite many challenges, Tesla has produced and delivered over 200,000 vehicles in Q2 2021.
In the second quarter, the electric vehicle company produced 206,421 vehicles and delivered 201,250 vehicles.
“Our teams have done an outstanding job navigating through the global supply chain and logistics challenges,” the company said in a statement earlier.
“Congrats Tesla Team on over 200,000 cars built & delivered in Q2, despite many challenges!!” the CEO tweeted.
Last quarter, Tesla had 185,000 deliveries globally, which was a new record.
Model 3-based police car
Tesla has reportedly built its police car based on the Model 3 electric sedan in the UK and it plans to use it to test the UK emergency vehicle market.
Tesla UK has revealed police liveried Model 3 saloon fitted with blues-and-twos, which the company said will be available to emergency services across the UK for trial and assessment.
The automaker did not reveal any specs for the new vehicle, but it looks like it could be a Model 3 Performance, Electrek reported.
With over 300 miles of range, a top speed of 162 mph, and an acceleration from 0 to 60 mph in just 3.1 seconds, it should more than fit the needs of a patrol car.
In recent years, the Model 3 has become the best-selling electric car in the UK and at times, even the best-selling car, period.
However, there have not been any reported Model 3s used as police vehicles.
Many police departments have done the math and figured out that they could save a lot of money by upgrading their fleets to Tesla vehicles, especially the Model 3, the report said.
Bargersville Police Department in Indiana, which purchased several Tesla Model 3 vehicles. It found after the first full year of using the Tesla Model 3, they had already saved over $6,000, it added.
Fremont Police and the Spokane Police Department have both also recently acquired Tesla Model Y vehicles to use as police patrol vehicles.
But with these projects, the police departments buy the vehicles from Tesla and have them modified to fit their needs as patrol cars.
In this case, Tesla has built the police vehicle itself and plans to offer it for testing to emergency services across the UK.
Tesla vehicles are far from reaching a level of autonomy often described by Musk on social media…reports Asian Lite News
Despite tall claims made by Elon Musk over Twitter about the full self-driving technology, electric car-maker Tesla has privately admitted that such claims do not match up with the engineering reality.
Tesla vehicles are far from reaching a level of autonomy often described by Musk on social media, according to an internal memo obtained by transparency portal Plainsite.
“Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ. Tesla is at Level 2 currently,” Tesla’s director of Autopilot software CJ Moore told the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)
Level 2 technology refers to a semi-automated driving system, which requires supervision by a human driver.
The memo shows that “Musk has inflated the capabilities of the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system in Tesla vehicles, as well the company’s ability to deliver fully autonomous features by the end of the year,” reports TechCrunch.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (File photo: IANS)
Tesla vehicles come with a driver assistance system called ‘Autopilot’ that enhances safety and convenience behind the wheel. When used properly, Autopilot reduces your overall workload as a driver.
For an additional $10,000, people can buy “full self-driving” or FSD, that Musk promises will deliver full autonomous driving capabilities.
Full Self-Driving capabilities include navigate on Autopilot, Auto Lane Change, Summon (moves your car in and out of a tight space using the mobile app or key),
Smart Summon (your car will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces); Traffic and Stop Sign Control (Beta) and Autosteer on city streets (upcoming).
However, Tesla vehicles are still not driving on their own and “are far from reaching that level of autonomy”.
Tesla Model Y. (Photo: Twitter/@Tesla)
In an earnings call in January, Musk told investors that he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year”.
Tesla, however, is unlikely to achieve Level 5 (L5) autonomy, in which its cars can drive themselves anywhere without any human supervision by the end of 2021.
“The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation. Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year,” the DMV memo read.
The satellite broadband company will double the internet speed to 300 Mbps this year…reports Asian Lite News.
A world without internet is inconceivable in the present days. Elon Musk has said that the new Starlink internet service by SpaceX that will make web access more affordable for people in remote areas worldwide including in India should be fully mobile later this year.
The satellite broadband company will double the internet speed to 300 Mbps this year.
The company currently promises speeds between 50 and 150 Mbps for the Starlink project that plans to deliver high-speed internet through a network of about 12,000 satellites. The company has already put over 1,200 of its Starlink satellites in orbit.
Responding to a follower on Twitter about the launch of the service, Musk said on Friday: “Yeah, should be fully mobile later this year, so you can move it anywhere or use it on an RV or truck in motion. We need a few more satellite launches to achieve compete coverage & some key software upgrades.”
“Service uptime, bandwidth & latency are improving rapidly. Probably out of beta this summer,” he added.
SpaceX has sought approval from regulators in the US to connect its Starlink satellite Internet network to large vehicles including trucks and ships.
The request, filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), marks a move to expand the Starlink satellite Internet network from rural areas to other sectors.
Musk has clarified that SpaceX is not connecting the Starlink satellite Internet network to Tesla cars.
“Not connecting Tesla cars to Starlink, as our terminal is much too big. This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & Rvs,” he said in a tweet.
SpaceX is currently offering the beta version of Starlink on pre-orders in India for a fully refundable deposit of $99.
